With King Nebuchadnezzar II the city of Babylon reached the peak of its glory and set itself in the position of the Third World Power of Bible history. So its greatest height was reached shortly before its fall. Because even her greatest king clung to magical arts, Jehovah’s prophet Isaiah could, when foretelling her doom, tell her to resort to her magical arts and her stargazers, sorcerers and monthly forecasters to try to save her from disaster if they could. But it would be in vain, for Jehovah had doomed her.

BABYLON’S RELIGIOUS TOWER

Babylon’s false religion, which first revealed itself historically in her original Tower of Babel, doomed her from the start for eventual destruction. In the days of her most glorious king, Nebuchadnezzar II, she had her tower of religion, built doubtless on the foundations of the very tower where Jehovah God confused the language of the builders. It was situated in the southern part of the city, not far from the eastern or right bank of the Euphrates River. By King Nebuchadnezzar and his royal father it was called Ziqqurat Bâbîli, that is, “The Tower of Babylon.” It was dedicated to Babylon’s chief god, Merodach, and his wife Zēr-panîtu^m.

The tower had a great foundation upon which as a platform were built six square stages and it had a sanctuary at the top, this being dedicated to the god Bel-Merodach, whom the evidence indicates to have been the mighty hunter Nimrod deified. Around the base of the tower were small temples or chapels dedicated to various other gods of the Babylonians.

BABYLON’S TEACHING ON SOUL SICKENS THE NATIONS

Another outstanding feature about the religion of Babylon is that it taught the immortality of the human soul. Of course, when Babylon deified the first king, Nimrod, at his death, which is not described in the Bible, it had to attribute immortality of soul to Nimrod, or Merodach. In the Babylonian myth about Gilgamesh, whom some investigators try to identify with Nimrod, this half-man and half-god Gilgamesh sought immortality of his human body, in other words, indestructible life on earth. In the twelfth book of the epic of Gilgamesh he is granted an interview with his dead one-time companion, who “describes the gloomy abode of the afterworld, and tells of the various futures that await the dead, according to the manner of their ends.”—The Encyclopedia Americana, edition of 1929, Volume 12, page 654.

In the Babylonian religion Nergal was the god of the underworld and his wife Eresh-kigal was the sovereign lady thereof. Showing that the Babylonians did not believe in the immortality of the human body but did believe in the immortality of what the Greeks called a psykhé or “soul,” we read the following concerning “the last things” as understood by the Babylonians:

After death the souls of men were supposed to continue in existence. It can hardly be called life. The place to which they have gone is called the “land of no return. There they lived in dark rooms amid the dust and the bats covered with a garment of feathers, and under the dominion of Nergal and Eresh-kigal. When the soul arrived among the dead he had to pass judgment before the judges of the dead, the Annunaki, but little has been preserved for us concerning the manner of this judgment. There seems to have been at times an idea that it might be possible for the dead to return again to life, for in this underworld there was the water of life, which was used when the god Tammuz returned again to earth [as vegetation]. The Babylonians . . . placed often with the dead articles which might be used in his future existence. . . . In the future world there seem to have been distinctions made among the dead. Those who fell in battle seem to have had special favor. They received fresh water to drink, while those who had no posterity to put offerings at their graves suffered sore and many deprivations. . . . The Babylonian doctrine was that man, though of Divine origin, did not share in the Divine attribute of immortality [that is, immortality of his body].—The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, page 373.

Along with astrology, fear of demons and trinity, this teaching, as originated in Babylon and propagated among the peoples of earth, led to the unscriptural doctrines of hellfire, purgatory, reincarnation, transmigration of souls and spiritism, with which all nations and most of their religionists are being spiritually sickened to death. If your religion holds any of these doctrines, you can be sure it is Babylon-contaminated and constitutes one of the false religious strongholds springing from the rebellious Babylonish source.

These are only a few of the deceptions founded in ancient demon-dominated Babylon, as a base on which the invisible deceiver, Satan the Devil, builds a religious structure for world deception. Babylon suffered a fall when Jehovah God confused the language of its builders at the Tower of Babel, but it was not destroyed at that time. Later it passed from the hands of Hamitic rulers to Shemite rulers, but this did not turn aside the doom to which it had been condemned by God. The foretold destruction befell the famed city and at last its very location became unknown. But what is the Greater Babylon, foretold in the Bible to fall with a tremendous crash? Further Bible investigation will reveal this.

Plain Speaking About Nicaea and the Trinity

WELL-KNOWN writer and historian H. G. Wells had very definite ideas about the doctrine of the trinity. In his book God the Invisible King he outlined his own religious belief and why he rejected the Trinity. In the preface he remarks: “The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all religious gatherings.”

Yes, that is where all the trouble started, thought H. G. Wells, and any who raised a voice in protest did not stand a chance. He adds, “The systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoiled good business.” Emperor Constantine took the lead in this because he wanted a united empire at any price.

But if this is true, how could such a deception persist through the centuries until today? Says Wells, “A large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all the churches rests.”

It was the firm belief of H. G. Wells that there was no greater stumbling block to understanding God than the trinity. He turned away from it with the comment, “By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological notions, the Nicene deity, ‘This is certainly no God.’”